THE BEATlES
527
much into the lyrics of their songs. The Beatles are now beyond
patronization, and this is especially satisfying to those like myself
who have wondered how much longer the literary academic adjudi–
cators could claim to be taking the
arts
seriously by promoting a couple
of distinguished novels every year, a few films, some poems, maybe a
museum show and, if they're really lucky, a play.
Of course to delay a revolution there are ways and ways of final–
ly
paying considered attention to the lower orders. One way is to
sociologize in the manner, McLuhan or pre-McLuhan, that forces
the good and the bad in the popular arts to lie down in the same
categories. There'll surely be a piece announcing, say, that the Beatles
"represent" - a favorite word in the shelving process - not just the
young but an aristocracy of the young. And of course they are
aristocratic: in their carelessness, their assumption that they can enact
anyone else's life just for the fun of it, their tolerance for the things
they do make fun of, their delight in wildness along with a disdain
for middle-class rectitudes, their easy expertness, their indifference
to the wealth they are happy to have, their pleasures in costume and
in a casual eccentricity of ordinary dress, their in-group language not
meant, any more than is Bob Dylan'S - another such aristocrat–
to make ordinary sense. That kind of accommodation is familiar by
now, and so is another, which is to admit them into the company of
their "betters." You know, the way jazz is like Bach? Well, some–
times they are like Monteverdi and sometimes their songs are even
better than Schumann's. But that won't work either. Liverpool boys
of their sort have been let into Eton before, and not on the assump–
tion that it would be the style of Eton that would change.
It won't be easy to accommodate the Beatles, and that's nowadays
almost the precondition for exciting the pastoral concern of Responsi–
ble Critics. Literary and academic grown-ups will discover that their
favorite captive audience, the young in school, really have listened
to the Beatles' kind of music and won't buy the yam of significance
that ensnares most adult talk about the other arts. Any effort to
<Iccount for what the Beatles are doing will be difficult, as I've learned
from this not very extensive and inexpert try, but only to the extent
that talking about the experience of any work of art is more difficult
than talking about the theory of it, or the issues in it or the history
around
iL
The results of any such effort by a number of people
